Bachelorette: Kirsten Dunst and Her Cohort Make Naughty

In Leslye Headland's Bachelorette, the bride's wedding dress is in terrible danger, and you know it the second that Regan (Kirsten Dunst) suggests that her two high-school BFFs, Gena (Lizzy Caplan) and Katie (Isla Fisher), drag it out for their coke-enabled bachelorette afterparty. Headland has a fondness for stringing up all kinds of swords of Damocles above the characters—and the dress—and just letting them hang there. Over the course of the night, the women indulge in drugs, alcohol, and sex (though not a lot of food, strangely, despite the proliferation of weed), through a plot that recalls the "into the night" genre of the 1980s, like After Hours, Something Wild, and, um, Into the Night: old-school picaresques in which humble figures like your Griffin Dunne (or your C-3PO) are swept into the gulf stream of an unstoppable event—the event in this case being the wedding, and the women's frantic attempts to repair the dress before morning. Dunst's Regan is a quad-core, hyper-threaded event planner who parallel-tasks career execution and employee terrorization with stylized bitchiness. In accordance with cinematic rules about likability in commercial films, Regan's tough-ass persona is just a masky ol' facade hiding a vulnerable, funny charmer who never found the right dude. As the planner for Becky's wedding, she gets some big damn hero moments during the climax. Meanwhile, Caplan, whose unfortunate abdomen you might remember exploding in Cloverfield, steals all her scenes, takes them to the Target returns desk for illicit refunds, and spends all the money on whatever unicorn sweat gives you big, dewy eyes like Mary-Louise Parker.